I’m taking a blog break to reproduce some portions from the Archbishop of Canterbury’s sermon this morning, a sermon that almost suggests that he’s been squandering precious archepiscopal moments reading the blogthread about spirituality and devotion that Tom, Kurt, Steve, Dave and I have been hashing out.
(Parenthetically, the first Disseminary online seminar will be on “Spirituality and Technology.” We’ve recruited Prof. Wes Avram of Yale Divinity School to conduct it for us. This’ll be a great opportunity to work on these issues, and Trevor and I will be receiving requests to participate from anyone who’s willing to read the assignments and take part in the seminar-blog.)
The Most Reverend Rowan Williams said:
Once we recognise God's great secret, that we are all made to be God's sons and daughters, we can't avoid the call to see one another differently.(Quoted from ic.Wales.co.uk) Posted by AKMA at February 27, 2003 01:16 PM | TrackBack
No one can be written off; no group, no nation, no minority can just be a scapegoat to resolve our fears and uncertainties," he said.
And this is what unsettles our loyalties, conservative or liberal, right wing or left, national and international.
We have to learn to be human alongside all sorts of others, the ones whose company we don't greatly like, whom we didn't choose, because Jesus is drawing us together into his place, his company. . . .The Christian will engage with passion in the world of our society and politics - out of a real hunger and thirst to see God's image, the destiny of human beings to become God's sons and daughters come to light - and, it must be said, out of a real grief and fear of what the human future will be if this does not come to light.
The Church has to warn and to lament as well as comfort. . . .When Christians grieve or protest about war, about debt and poverty, about prejudice, about the humiliations of unemployment or the vacuous cruelty of sexual greed and unfaithfulness, about the abuse of children or the neglect of the helpless elderly, it is because of the fear we rightly feel when insult and violence blot out the divine image in our human relations, the reflection to one another of the promise of Jesus in one another.
And anything that begins to make us casual about this is one more contribution to obscuring the original image of God in us, another layer of dust and grime over the bright face of Christ. . . .
Does there come a point where we can't recognise the same Jesus, the same secret?
"The Anglican Church is often accused of having no way of answering this. I don't believe it.
"We read the same Bible and practise the same sacraments and say the same creeds," he said.
"But I do believe that we have the very best of reasons for hesitating to identify such a point too quickly or easily - because we believe in a Jesus who is truly Lord and God, not the prisoner of my current thoughts or experiences.
"And it is this that gives us the freedom and the obligation to challenge what our various cultures may say about humanity," he said.
If all we have to offer is a Jesus who makes sense to me and people like me, we have no saving truth to give. . . .
The most significant question I can ask myself in your presence about the work ahead is ‘What do I pray for in the Church of the future?’
Confidence, courage, an imagination set on fire by the vision of God the Holy Trinity, thankfulness.
The Church of the future, I believe, will do both its prophetic and its pastoral work effectively only if it is concerned first with gratitude and joy.
Orthodoxy flows from this, not the other way around, and we don't solve our deepest problems just by better discipline but by better discipleship, a fuller entry into the intimate joy of Jesus's life. . . .
About 12 years ago, I was visiting an Orthodox monastery, and was taken to see one of the smaller and older chapels," he said.
It was a place intensely full of the memory and reality of prayer.
The monk showing me around pulled the curtain from in front of the sanctuary, and inside was a plain altar and one simple picture of Jesus, darkened and rather undistinguished.
But for some reason at that moment it was as if the veil of the temple was torn in two: I saw as I had never seen the simple fact of Jesus at the heart of all our words and worship, behind the curtain of our anxieties and our theories, our struggles and our suspicion.
Simply there. Nothing anyone can do about it, there he is as he has promised to be till the world's end.
Nothing of value happens in the Church that does not start from seeing him simply there in our midst, suffering and transforming our human disaster.
"The Church of the future, I believe, will do both its prophetic and its pastoral work effectively only if it is concerned first with gratitude and joy.
Orthodoxy flows from this, not the other way around..."
Wow. Yeah.
You said it, Pascale. We got a good one, this time.
Posted by: AKMA at February 27, 2003 08:30 PMFor this program, it was a bit of overkill. It's a lot of overkill, actually. There's usually no need to store integers in the Heap, unless you're making a whole lot of them. But even in this simpler form, it gives us a little bit more flexibility than we had before, in that we can create and destroy variables as we need, without having to worry about the Stack. It also demonstrates a new variable type, the pointer, which you will use extensively throughout your programming. And it is a pattern that is ubiquitous in Cocoa, so it is a pattern you will need to understand, even though Cocoa makes it much more transparent than it is here.
Posted by: Wymond at January 13, 2004 10:08 AMWe can see an example of this in our code we've written so far. In each function's block, we declare variables that hold our data. When each function ends, the variables within are disposed of, and the space they were using is given back to the computer to use. The variables live in the blocks of conditionals and loops we write, but they don't cascade into functions we call, because those aren't sub-blocks, but different sections of code entirely. Every variable we've written has a well-defined lifetime of one function.
Posted by: Hercules at January 13, 2004 10:08 AMThis back and forth is an important concept to understand in C programming, especially on the Mac's RISC architecture. Almost every variable you work with can be represented in 32 bits of memory: thirty-two 1s and 0s define the data that a simple variable can hold. There are exceptions, like on the new 64-bit G5s and in the 128-bit world of AltiVec
Posted by: Hector at January 13, 2004 10:08 AM